The Government Digital Service has shed light on work to revamp the Service Standard for online citizen tools, with an ambition to deliver a “shift from a static, assessment-led model to a living system that supports the whole lifecycle of a service”.
Beginning life as the Digital Service Standard, compliance with the framework has been mandatory across government for 12 years. Departments are required to pass GDS-led assessments at each stage of service development, including, discovery, alpha, beta, and live. In these examinations, services must demonstrate adherence to 14 standards.
"Small time savings were observed across most use cases, with written tasks presenting the largest time savings," the report said.
But, while the framework is “lauded at home and abroad” and “remains a successful baseline for quality across government”, it is often regarded as a singular test to be passed, rather than being “embedded in continuous improvement of service operations”, according to a blog post from GDS officials Emily Ball and Nia Williams.
The dedicated government tech unit is also “seeing strong digital practice emerging” throughout the public sector – which is contributing to “inconsistent interpretations of what good looks like”.
“This creates a risk of inconsistent experiences, both for those employed to build digital services and the people that use them to reach an outcome,” Ball and Williams added. “We want to address that.”
Doing so will involve “reimagining” the Service Standard with a new framework dedicated to “bringing together strong standards, sector collaboration and practical implementation”.
The next iteration of the standard will be designed so as to “support continuous improvement towards meeting standards, enabling methods for evaluation and assessing what has been created”.
It will also “reflect the reality of end-to-end services, including operational and non-digital elements, bring together best practice from across the public sector, provide leaders with better visibility of the development process and means to evaluate the adoption of standard”, according to the blog post.
“Our aim is simple: to make the Service Standard something organisations actively demonstrate every day — not something they prove,” it added.
The new guidelines will simply not be a diktat created and handed down by GDS but, rather, will be “developed by diverse contribution so that they meet the needs of the many”.
The new version will also be accompanied a new dedicated service “that helps organisations adopt and apply standards in practice, not just assess against them”, wrote Ball and Williams – who respectively work for GDS as deputy director for service transformation and service owner.
GDS is currently “at an early stage of this work” but, as it development of the new standard continues, representatives of public bodies are invited to get in touch with the digital unit if they are interested in helping to “test ideas, understand what works in practice, [and] ensure the standard reflects real challenges in practice”
The blog added: “Over the coming months, we will work on: shaping and validating the vision for a modern Service Standard; working with partners across government and the wider public sector; developing and testing our approach to governance and standards development; [and] building a roadmap for implementation.”
The current standard sets out 14 objectives which services are required to meet: understand users and their needs; solve a whole problem for users; provide a joined-up experience across all channels; make the service simple to use; make sure everyone can use the service; have a multidisciplinary team; use agile ways of working; iterate and improve frequently; create a secure service which protects users’ privacy; define what success looks like and publish performance data; choose the right tools and technology; make new source code open; use and contribute to open standards, common components and patterns; and operate a reliable service.